A little background: I'm an avid dreamer and have great dream recall, sometimes up to 5-7 per night.

In my experience, I can sometimes trace some elements of the dream to an event that occured within a 1-3 day window prior to the dream.

I've done similar experiments with the process of idea generation, where an idea that I have can be traced to experiences from the previous 1-3 days.

This makes me interested if there have been some kind of studies on how rapidly the brain absorbs and assimilates information from short term memory over to the long term memory. Has there been any studies on how long the brain keeps information before discarding or processing/assimilating it into dreams or new ideas?